Collective Impact Blog

United Ways have been playing an important role in communities, serving as volunteer-led, nonprofit organizations, working for over 125 year in issues such as education, health, and poverty—all issues well aligned with a collective impact approach. With recent developments of Collective Impact many United Way local chapters have started playing a more active role in collective impact initiatives, either as a backbone organization, partner organization, or advocate for the idea.

FSG released its newest article around the concept of collective impact, Channeling Change: Making Collective Impact Work a few weeks ago, and we have already seen a remarkable uptake of the article and the concepts outlined in the article. The field is thirsty to learn more about HOW to truly make collective impact work.

Imagine a 6th grade chemistry classroom. The students have been assigned to conduct a laboratory experiment. Teams have a common agenda: to perform the experiment, measure results and report back learnings. Teams have formed; measurement standards have been set. As the work begins, the different team members are performing reinforcing tasks and communicating with each other, but as the lab experiment progresses we begin to see some teams fall apart. Groups of students are disagreeing on who needs to do what, where they can find supplies in the lab and when deadlines are. Frankly, the classroom is beginning to lose its ability to focus on the task at hand. As we look around the classroom, we begin to wonder, “Where is the teacher that is supposed to be planning, managing, and handling this group?”